The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

I’d never had sex before. I think it happens later for fat kids. While everyone else was trying each other on, I was still trying to figure out why I never fit into anything. I don’t regret that. I can’t imagine doing this out in the world where I am the worst thing that can happen to somebody.

I didn’t know what it would be like. I hope it’s this good for everyone, with a circle of adoring worshippers vying for the right to adore you, to touch every inch of you, to murmur in wonder as you climax again and again until nap time, when you are lovingly spooned and crooned to sleep. I luxuriated in it for a long time, not thinking about what it meant to only touch thin people, to only be touched by them. I watched my bank balance climb. I didn’t ask myself what they saw when they looked at me. I existed as a collection of nerves that did not think.

I stopped thinking about going home. I stopped thinking about the Pill. I stopped thinking. I became what I had always been and nothing more: my fat, fat body.

When I came back to thinking again, I found it did not make things easier.

I have been here for three years now, and I don’t think I can ever live anywhere else. Outside, they tell me, there are no more like me. Only in places like here, where a few of us fled before the world could change us. Nobody is allowed to bring us food presents anymore; everyone is too worried they’ll try and slip us the Pill. Someone might actually be that upset that I exist. I don’t think about that either. I don’t exist for them. I accept their worship and forget their faces completely. It’s always the same face anyhow.

Sometimes I point my camera at that face and ask them what they’re doing here, what do they want, why did they come seeking the thing they’ve worked so hard to avoid becoming?

They mumble about mothers and goddesses, about the embrace of flesh and the fullness of desire. It sounds like my own voice inside my head. I think about my dad, about god’s hands. Would he have been one of these? Would he have come to miss my mother’s body the way he first knew it?

I think about showing this film in LA. I think about Denny telling me I can leave here anytime. I think about how I could leave my body anytime, too, how any of us can. I think about Andrew, about how he left his and gained nothing at all. How I used to see him as the enemy when he was just me.

Deep down on the lowest floor, in perfect privacy, the fats make love to each other. There is a boy who came only a few weeks ago, an import from one of the countries that’s taken to the Pill slowly, so we have a lot of recruits from their shores. We had no common language at first, but we’ve worked on that and discovered an unmapped country between us. He’s so sweet and shy and eager to lift the heaviness of his belly so that he can slip inside me and then drop it on top of mine, warm and weighty like a curtain. He whispers to me that we don’t ever have to go back, that we can raise darling fat babies right here, that we’ll become like another species. Homo pillus can inherit the earth, while Homo lipidus lives in secret.